There’s lots of stuff out there about improving your workflow on Macs (lots of it based around Getting Things Done or similar ideas). I do have a Mac, and some of this I’ve found very useful (and some less so, admittedly).
But I’ve not seen much out there on similar tricks for Linux. Bash & vim (& prob emacs but I don’t use that ;) ) tricks, yes, but are there any other apps or tricks that you’ve found to make your working life easier on LInux?
For me, the two that spring to mind immediately:
- ClusterSSH, which I’ve blogged about before.
- Nostalgy Thunderbird extension, which provides keyboard shortcuts for moving messages & auto-completes folders. (seriously, this has made my email life much happier!)
A good general principal for me is "keep your hands off the mouse as much as possible". So, configuring keyboard shortcuts in Gnome to launch a terminal, switch desktops maximize a window vertically/horizontally/both, move a window to the next desktop, close window, run program, all make me feel more productive.
Another thing I do is actively use 8 virtual desktops with different groups of applications on each desktop. Instead of fighting alt-tab to get me to the application I want, I go to the desktop and *maybe* have to alt-tab a time or two to get to it.
Concerning email, I'm kind of stuck with Exchange at work, so Evolution is the best thing available for Linux. It has a surprising number of out-of-the-box keyboard shortcuts including moving messages to folders like nostalgy.
And again on the "keep your hands off the mouse" front, when I'm browsing in Firefox, I *never* click in the address field or the search engine field. Control-L puts focus in the address field and Control-K puts focus in the search engine field. I almost never click on a particular tab. Control-page(up|down) works great. And I never click on the back button. Alt-leftarrow does just fine. Konqueror takes things a little further if you're interested in trying KDE (or installing Konqueror under Gnome). I think it's the control key that toggles what look like tool tips popping up above every link on a page. The "tool tip" contains a number of letter (can't remember which). When you type in that number/letter on the keyboard, it'll take you to that link. I think that's pretty cool. There's probably a plugin for it for Firefox, though.
Anyway, thanks so much for your excellent blog. I really enjoy reading it!
I also like using my keyboard in my windowmanager. And I want to not waste any place on my screen for things like window-bars.
So, my windowmanager of choice is ratpoison (http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/). If you know Screen, you shouldn't have any problems with ratpoison. If you don't, it may take some hours to get productive.
Jeremy - thanks for the Firefox shortcut tips. I too have quite a few Gnome keyboard shortcuts defined.
queltos - think ratpoison is going a bit far for me! Although I may give it a go at some point. Thanks for the link though. I do use screen a lot.